The Bird
- Karl Johansson
- 8 dec.
- 24 min läsning
Uppdaterat: för 22 timmar sedan
This is part two of a five part series on Elon Musk, Twitter, and how social media does and should work in a modern society. You can find the first part here:
The Bird
Most discussions about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter focus on Musk, as indeed did ours in the previous part, but it is also worth discussing Twitter itself. As alluded to in ‘The Man’, the question of whether or not it was wise to let Musk buy Twitter begs the question of whether Twitter is a valuable institution which needs to be protected from the whims of a powerful corporate executive. Twitter looms large in the public imagination as the place on the internet where news breaks first, politics and journalism happens, and as a platform which played a major part in movements like the Arab Spring and the January 6th riots. It is also rife with misinformation, cyberbullying, and petty drama. The second chapter of ‘The Bird & The Technoking’ will explore X, formerly Twitter, which will be referred to as Twitter for simplicity’s sake, and attempt to answer the question of whether Twitter truly is “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated” as Musk has called1 it. Or if it is just another surveillance capitalist machine aiming to squeeze its users for as much valuable data as possible.
Twitter began life as a side project2 to Odeo, a podcast platform started by Noah Glass and Evan Williams in 2005. Twittr, as it was known at the time, was conceived by one of Odeo’s software engineers: Jack Dorsey. Dorsey would go on to become a major figure at Twitter and we will discuss him more later on, but for now it is just worth noting that he was one of the co-founders of Twitter at Odeo. The basic idea for Twitter was according to a New York Times2 article in 2010 apparently conceived by Dorsey “[w]hile sitting on a children’s slide at a park eating Mexican food one day”. Twitter is often described as a micro-blog, a place where people can discuss and share their thoughts in 140-character increments, later increased to 280 characters in 2017. And one of the other co-founders, Evan Williams had started the blogging platform Blogger in the late nineties. Twitter was as mentioned a side project back in 2006 and it is clear why. Before Facebook had blazed the trail there was no blueprint for a social media platform. What made Twitter stand out in the early days was mainly novelty. Twitter is in a sense an accident of history. Several reports3 about the company note4that the platform did not take off until the technology conference South by Southwest in 2007. Through some clever marketing where tweets (though people at the time apparently called them twitters) were displayed on large screens the platform become a fun novelty which managed to become a real platform when enough people got on Twitter.
The promise of Twitter is and has always been that it is where things on the internet happen. The first reactions to news, politics, events, albums, video games, fashion shows, and drama is on Twitter, so if you want to be where the discussion is you need to be on Twitter. The short form text format helped Twitter fill that niche online. You could react on Facebook or Reddit but it is faster to type a tweet than a status update or starting a thread, and because of how Twitter’s feed works you have a better chance of getting people to see your tweet than your status update. The Twitter we know today required a lot of iterative design improvements and experiments to arrive to. Fundamental and much copied ideas like the hashtag was not a feature at launch, it was created by one of Twitter’s users to make the platform easier to navigate for power users. One of the main differences between Twitter and other social media platforms, like those operated by Meta, was how open early Twitter was to ideas from the user base. All social media platforms are defined by two constituent parts: the technology and the culture. What was unique about Twitter in its early days was that it outsourced both parts to its users. Unlike its main rival Facebook, Twitter allowed third party developers to make Twitter clients, i.e. software for users to access Twitter without going through the official Twitter site or app. These third party clients were influential in shaping Twitters feature set and culture as many power users preferred third party clients to the official Twitter site. For example, the iconic blue bird which was synonymous with Twitter was first introduced5 by Twitterific, a Twitter client developed by The Iconfactory fully three years before Twitter began using it. Other essential and quintessentially Twitter features6 like @ mentions, tweeting pictures, and retweets were also invented by users and third parties rather than Twitter developers. In fact, even the term ‘tweeting’, although invented by a Twitter developer, was popularised by a third party platform as the company originally used the term ‘twittering’.
At the same time as Twitter was starting to pick up users who in turn came up with creative solutions to make the platform more usable things were happening at the Twitter corporate offices. Jack Dorsey had been the CEO of Twitter between its founding on 2006 and 2008 when he was forced to step down. According to a Twitter corporate blog post7, Dorsey was simply a less good fit for a growing Twitter than Twitter’s product manager and co-founder Evan Williams at that time. The blog post states: “While the board of directors and the company have nothing but praise for where Jack has taken us, we also agree that the best way forward is for Jack to step into the role Chairman, and for me to become CEO. Jack will remain on the board and be closely consulted for all strategic decisions, while I take on day-to-day operations with the support of Biz, Jason, Greg, and the rest of this impressive Twitter team.” In a March 2011 interview8with Vanity Fair Dorsey’s version of events is less harmonious: “’It was like being punched in the stomach,’ Jack Dorsey, who invented Twitter, tells Vanity Fair’s David Kirkpatrick about losing the job of C.E.O. […] Dorsey admits that his failure as a manager was a factor in his ouster from Twitter. ‘I let myself be in a weird position because it always felt like [Evan Williams’s] company. He funded it. He was the chairman. And I was this new guy who was a programmer, who had a good idea. I would not be strong in my convictions, basically, because he was the older, wiser one,’ he says. ‘It just got a lot bigger a lot faster than anyone expected,’ says Williams, who became C.E.O. after Dorsey but stepped down in October 2010. ‘A year and a half later we’d raised $20 million, and the servers were crashing every day. It wasn’t so much that the ship was sinking, but more ‘Great job, Jack—we’ve got to up our level of experience and lay some foundation for a much bigger organization.’” Leadership changes are common at Twitter which has in its 17 year history had five different CEOs and Jack Dorsey has been CEO at two separate occasions. Compare that to Meta where Mark Zuckerberg has been CEO for the company’s entire history. Other social media platforms like TikTok and Reddit have also had significantly fewer changes in leadership than Twitter. Perhaps it was the lack of strong leadership which made Twitter what it is. While platforms like Facebook and TikTok had leaders with the power and long tenures to shape their platforms Twitter did not, and that opened the door for its users to create a culture less shaped by the platform’s corporate goals and more shaped by power users’ wishes. Before Twitter’s next era where the conception of the company took on more grandiose overtones leadership changed hands one more time. The new CEO was Dick Costolo, a former consultant and improv comic; and the man who first called Twitter “the global town square” at a Brookings Institution event9 in 2013.
Twitter is especially noteworthy due for how more often things from Twitter break out into the real world compared to other social media. Reputable US newspapers like the Wall Stret Journal, New York Times, and the Washington Post regularly wrote about what the former US president Donald Trump was tweeting, and Twitter has been at the epicentre of several political movements across the world. The first time Twitter was a major catalyst in politics was the April 2009 protest that rocked the Moldovan capital Chișinău after parliamentary elections. The election was seen as rigged by some which sparked a protest with about 10 000 protesters which turned violent. International media10 dubbed it the ‘Twitter Revolution’11 due to the protests being organised primarily through Twitter. Social media’s usefulness in organising protests would be realised by protesters across the world and Twitter was used to organise protests in at least three other places in 2009 alone. With social media’s rapid rise in popularity coinciding with the global financial crisis and Euro crisis around the end of the 2000’s beginning of the 2010’s it was inevitable that social media would be used to organise protests, but it is interesting to note that despite its limited feature set Twitter was the main platform for organising protests. Its arch-rival Facebook would seem much better suited to the complex organisation needed for a movement with tens of thousands of protesters, and the 140-character limit which was active at the time would have made it difficult to convey what the protest was against, or to convey the protesters demands. Still, Twitter was the platform people used, and to speculate for a moment, perhaps it was these protests the Twitter platform helped to organise which solidified it as a platform for politicians and journalists.
As mentioned there were many protests which Twitter helped facilitate during this time, but to save time let us focus on the big one: the Arab spring in 2011. There is some debate regarding how instrumental social media was in the events of early 2011 which led to the ousting of long-time rulers like Hosni Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Muammar Ghaddafi, and Ali Abdullah Saleh. On one hand it makes for a compelling story that new Western technology enabled the people of the Middle East to throw of the yoke of autocratic rule. On the other hand, social media was more of a conduit for transmitting information than an active force in the events. Protests are easier to organise on the internet, but people protest because they are upset, not because it is convenient to do so. The Arab spring is a more sombre episode now more than a decade after it passed than it seemed in the West at the time. As mentioned, several long serving autocratic rulers were deposed, and that opened the door for genuine democracy in places like Egypt and Tunisia. But vested interests in Egypt didn’t fancy democracy, and Libya and Yemen collapsed into long, bloody civil wars after the local strongman fell.
Irrespective of how we might interpret those events today, the Arab spring was an important piece in the myth of social media back in the US. As we touched on in ‘The Man’, the California tech economy likes grandiose ideas of how big men and their tech firms can change the world, and for a while it looked like Zuckerberg and Dorsey delivered democracy to the Middle East with C+ and HTML in a way Bush and his bombs never could. The idea that social media was more than a fun but ultimately unimportant digital social space proved powerful for the social media industry. Suddenly rote claims of “changing the world” tech firms are prone to seemed to ring true. If all a population needs to revolt against an unfair status quo is a convenient digital platform to connect with their friends and relatives, then there was no end to the good companies like Twitter could do. It would also make Twitter a more compelling investment, and the flattering story of empowering the common man across the world might convince its investors to let up the pressure to be profitable in the short to medium term.
While the idea of social media as an engine for progress was most common in the West, elites in the Middle East and North Africa who had been on the receiving end of the Arab Spring quickly realised social media’s power to act as a catalyst for protests, and the internet was even shut down completely12 in Egypt in late January 2011 in an effort to hinder the protests. A tactic which has since become standard operating procedure in autocratic regimes the world over. NATO13 summed up the state of discussion regarding social media’s role in the Arab Spring at the time when it wrote that: “The hand-wringing debate over whether these technologies are better suited to dictators or democrats is over. That is not to say that dictators do not use them effectively. They do. We are clear-eyed about the dangers of repression enhanced by sophisticated surveillance tools. But on the whole, the clear evidence of recent history shows that the network technologies infusing the nervous system of modern political, economic, and social life tend to resist centralized control and empower decentralised movements of ideas. The question then becomes how to harness these forces to serve the interests of the international community in promoting our common security, economic prosperity, and the realisation of political aspirations.”
While the history, implications, and politics of the Arab Spring are fascinating we are here to discuss Twitter, and for Twitter the Arab Spring marks the end of its early history and the start of its triumphant growth era. As often seems to be the case in Silicon Valley, the NATO piece shows how many in the US saw social media generally, and Twitter specifically, as a technology which rather than being inherently neutral, as a fundamentally positive force. The increased ability for people to communicate had led to a wave of pro-democracy (or at least anti-autocratic) protests across the less than free parts of the world, confirming the value of Valley tech. But Twitter had also become more relevant in politics closer to home as the preferred platform for politicians and journalists in the US. The increased attention brought by becoming an extension of the political sphere was relatively quickly seized as a business opportunity. In anticipation for the 2012 US presidential elections Twitter started14 running political promoted Tweets, and started building a dedicated “political ad sales team” in Washington DC. A VentureBeat article from 2011 explains that political candidate will be able to purchase all of Twitter’s ad products and praises the idea of political ads on Twitter writing: “With Twitter now being integrated in major televised debates and other facets of political campaigning, it only makes sense for the company to start running political advertising.” It also notes just how popular the young social media was proving with American politicians: “Right now, 85 U.S. Senators use Twitter, and 360 members of the House of Representatives also have accounts. The vast majority of state governors — 42 of 50 — are on Twitter, too. And of course, all the current major presidential contenders are using the microblogging service.” Who in their right mind would give up the opportunity to profit from some of the most expensive elections on the globe?
One of the ways Twitter tried to make sure its users knew if a Tweet was a paid political ad or not was a purple marker at the bottom of a Tweet. The feature was meant to make sure users knew that a Tweet was sponsored, and to make sure that trolls weren’t impersonating real politicians. Which had been an issue as early as 2009, when Republican politicians started Twitter accounts claiming15 to be official Democrat accounts. The Republican party claimed it was parody; the Democrats whose names were used considered it to be impersonation. We will see more of this later, but for now it is just worth noting that positioning a social media platform for use by politicians will inherently attract unscrupulous political actors, which becomes a problem for both the platform and its userbase. But as good faith use of the platform was still in the process of becoming mainstream the problem of disinformation and dishonesty which would characterise the autumn years of the 2010’s was not yet a major issue.
Former President Obama was at the time famous for his embrace of social media; the White House called16 him the “social media president” as it announced its digital transition to the 45th President. This embrace of Twitter by was not limited to just the politically engaged and politicians but all the supporting actors in politics: journalists and policy experts, diplomats and dictators, campaigners and trolls. It was practically inevitable that Obama would be the first social media President, by virtue of assuming office right when the social media sites were rapidly expanding it would have been difficult to avoid it even if you wanted to as a public figure. That being said, while Obama might have been the first social media President he was not the first ‘Twitter President’, and it is the handover of power from Obama to Donald J. Trump which cemented Twitter as the digital place to be in politics. Twitter is in many ways a poor tool for politicians as it is extremely limiting in terms of characters per tweet. How could you possibly explained detailed healthcare reforms in a mere 140 or 280 characters? That’s where President Trump comes in.
President Trump’s image during his campaign was of a raw and unfiltered politician; someone who spoke first and asked focus groups later. Instead of having a managed Twitter account where professional communicators craft a message and personal brand meant to appeal, Trump tweeted himself. Needless to say, that strategy was not only novel but intensely controversial – as most things related to Trump are – as Trump’s messages were as raw and unfiltered as the man himself. But what really made Trump the Twitter President was his chaotic governing and communication style. When policy decision were communicated through combative tweets rather than dry white papers you had to be on Twitter to be in the loop. Being informed meant being on Twitter. It was the only game in town.
An externality of Trump’s frequent tweeting was that that it drew in exactly the sort of people Twitter wanted to the platform: journalists and politicians. Traditional media added to Twitter’s fame and reputation by constantly referring to primary sources, which more often than not was the President’s Twitter feed. The list of New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles from the Trump presidency where the news is what Trump has tweeted that day is long, and the twenty four hour news cycle meant that people from all the corners of the world heard about what was happening on Twitter.
Meanwhile in the corporate headquarters, Dick Costolo had managed to get Twitter listed on the stock market in 2013, in what was considered quite the successful launch. Wired reported17 that the company was valued at $25 billion the week it was listed, despite having lost over $130 million in its first quarter that year. That quarterly loss was not due to bad luck or a temporary downturn in the advertising market. In fact, Twitter has only ever been profitable for two years in its history as a publicly listed company. Even with the massive growth in users the company recorded under Williams’ and Costolo’s tenures as CEO, and the media buzz generated first by the Arab Spring and then by President Trump’s incessant tweeting, the company still could not turn a profit. This constant failure to capitalize on huge revenues, the company had revenues of $2.2 billion in 2015 and still managed to lose $521 million that year, explains some of the churn at the corner office. By 2015 Jack Dorsey was back in charge, and by September 2016 CNBC reported18 that several companies including Google and Salesforce were considering submitting a bid to buy Twitter. A deal ultimately failed to materialise, but it is worth noting that Twitter has for most of its life been a lossmaking enterprise where the best-case scenario for its shareholders is being bought out at a premium valuation.
Unlike its rival Meta, Twitter was neither making money nor did it seem to have a good strategy for reaching profitability. Twitter had purchased the short form video app Vine in 2012, and live streaming app Periscope in 2015, which were discontinued in 2016 and 2021 respectively. The company continued trying new ideas like live podcasts and a substack competitor, but none of these products caught on. Twitter’s revenues grew from around $300 million in 2012 to around $5 billion in 2021 and yet the company’s costs managed to increase fast enough to keep the company in the red, even when the leader of the free world provided free marketing for Twitter daily.
Trump’s embrace of the platform was not enough to make the company profitable, and while the extra attention made sure Twitter stayed relevant, it also garnered controversy, as Trump is wont to do. Over the years between Trump’s first Presidential campaign and Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform conservatives in America became increasingly hostile19to social media in part as a broader trend of scepticism towards big business and in part due to a suspicion that social media firms had an institutional liberal bias. The idea was that Twitter as a San Francisco-based tech firm is more left-leaning than the average American as it is staffed by west coasters, university graduates, and tech professionals, three groups which tend to support the Democrats to a larger extent than the average American. The question of bias is both complicated and complex, and we will discuss how social media firms’ algorithms, business models, and the economics of the social media industry can, and often does lead to outcomes which are bad for society. But for now, it is worth noting that so far there is no evidence that Twitter intentionally and institutionally favours a specific ideology. However, that goes for the company and not its users. A 2020 Pew Research Center study20 found that 10% of Twitter’s users accounted for 92% of American tweets, and that 7/10 of top tweeters lean Democratic which naturally skews the user experience. And the appearance of bias can be just as damaging as actual bias.
As we discussed earlier, Twitter has been a useful platform for political movements across the world, and while much of the initial buzz around social media as a tool for political organization was centered on its potential to lead to fairer and more democratic societies it was probably inevitable that autocracies would use it to push their agenda. The most famous and large-scale influence operation conducted on social media was Russia’s 2016 campaign to intervene in American elections to benefit then-candidate Trump. A 2017 New York Times article21 states that there were approximately 36 000 accounts which posted 1.4 million tweets which received 288 million views which were part of Russia’s influence campaign, including 2 700 accounts from the infamous Internet Research Agency the equally infamous Yevgeny Prigozhin ran before his rise to fame in the war in Ukraine. The impact the misinformation campaign had is a matter of debate with some, like the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, arguing22 that it was a decisive factor in the 2016 election’s outcome and some, like New York University professor Joshua A. Tucker, arguing23 that while the campaign did have an effect it did not change attitudes or voting behaviour.
For the Russians it is immaterial whether or not the disinformation effort directly changed the outcome or not, as being caught in the act undermined the legitimacy of the election and in the public political discourse. For our purposes it is more interesting to consider why the Russian state thought Twitter was an interesting target for a disinformation campaign. Could it be that Vladimir Putin agrees with Elon Musk that Twitter is the global public square where matters vital to the future of humanity are discussed?
This discussion of who is the real ‘social media President’, Republicans souring on Twitter, and the Russian Interference in the 2016 election is interesting for its own sake but it also showcases how Twitter became a regular feature in the news after 2015. Twitter has had three phases where there have been three major narratives surrounding the platform and justifying why it is vital for You to be on there. In the early days between its launch in 2007 and the eve of the Arab Spring in 2011 the dominant narrative was one of novelty. You wanted to be on Twitter because others wanted to be on Twitter and in a time of rapid digitalisation it was exciting to be on the cutting edge; one of the early adopters and trend setters. In it is second phase between 2011 and 2016 Twitter was not just a banal social media platform where you could keep tabs on your friends and favourite celebrities, it was a tool of social progress. The Arab Spring seemed to prove that Francis Fukuyama’s end of history was inevitable and all the oppressed needed to throw off the yoke of autocracy was a convenient microblog. You had to be on Twitter because it was political movements reshaping the global political landscape originated. And in its third phase between 2016 and 2023 you had to be on Twitter because that was where politics and news happened, often bad news and bitter controversies, but where the most up to date and fresh political debates happened.
The third phase was formed by the phases which came before and the self-sustaining narrative and promise that Twitter is the place to be is constantly reinforced by the fact that so many people in politics and journalism is already on the platform that they will naturally go to Twitter to voice opinions and look for the latest news. This in turn creates a need to be on Twitter for any journalist or politician who is not already on the platform until adoption rates for those groups asymptotically approaches 100%. Twitter may genuinely be the de facto global public square where matters vital to the future of humanity is discussed, but make no mistake, that status is a product of Twitter’s self-reinforcing hype rather than its feature set. In fact, Twitter’s design and feature set is actively harmful for constructive political debate. Democratic politics is at its core about compromise and respect for your opponents’ point of view, and that requires deliberation and nuance. Twitter is all about speed and newsworthiness, you want to be first or most controversial to get a lot of views, likes, and retweets. It is not hard to see how the needs of constructive political debate and the incentives formed by Twitter’s design clash. The truth is that Twitter managed to become a public square in spite of its design features, not because of them.
Twitter’s popularity and status as the political corner of the internet is thus self-reinforcing, as we see in its third era. The #MeToo movement began in 2017 when allegations that film mogul Harvey Weinstein was a serial sex offender and rapist, allegations which would later be proven in courts of law in both New York and Los Angeles. The idea behind #MeToo was to use social media to demonstrate how common sexual assaults and sexual harassment is by getting victims to use the hashtag. It became a worldwide movement which led to arrests and oustings across industries and countries after actor Alyssa Milano suggested24 using the hashtag on October 15th 2017. Using social media to organise protests and social movements is nothing new, as we saw with the ‘Twitter Revolution’ and the Arab Spring protesters had used Twitter to organise for many years. What is interesting about #MeToo for our purposes is how taking the cause to Twitter was a key part of its success. The #MeToo movement we know did indeed start in October 2017, but that is not where the phrase originated. It was coined25 in 2006 by Tarana Burke and Burke started a MySpace page to support victims of sexual assault. Burke is quoted in a Washington Post article as saying that “MySpace got us a lot of attention” but it did not create a global movement. Why did the 2017 version get so much more spread than the 2006 version? Well, simply put, journalists are on Twitter not on MySpace. If you want your message heard, it helps to pick a forum where powerful and/or highly engaged people congregate.
After Musk took control of Twitter there have been many copycats trying to take Twitter’s throne. Parler and Truth Social courted American conservatives, and both are now facing financial problems. The company owning Parler stated26 that “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more” in April 2023. The deal27 intended to take Donald Trump’s Truth Social public had its deadline extended five times, and is estimated to have 6 million users. There are also liberal-leaning Twitter competitors, for example Mastodon and BlueSky. Bluesky has one million users28 though, and Mastodon ten million29. Which might sound impressive, but Twitter is a relatively small social media platform and it has about 540 million users30. Even Meta’s Twitter clone Threads has struggled to topple Musk’s giant, even with the numerous scandals and issues Musk has managed to cram into the short time he has run the firm. As we will discuss more in the next part, The Dilemma, social media benefits greatly from network effects where the more users a platform has the more attractive it is to join, making it so that it is very difficult to compete against an established social media platform. One of the critical missteps several of these Twitter clones have made is focusing on a specific user base. Being the Twitter for conservatives might sound like a good business plan, especially when American conservatives are suspicious about whether Twitter treats them fairly. But it runs into the problem of becoming an echo chamber. The main draw Twitter has is that everyone is on there; what fun is there in debating politics if there are no libs to own?
So where does this leave us? Is Twitter truly the “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”? We started our discussion with the history of Twitter to make the point that the distinction between the platforms which becomes massive hits and the ones which fizzle out is arbitrary. Twitter started out with a barebone feature set and its main selling point was novelty. To the people attending South by Southwest in 2007 the idea that Twitter would spawn a “Twitter Revolution” in Moldovia would probably be laughable – it was just a silly website for talking to your friends – yet that really happened just two short years later. Twitter has been the platform where news breaks and people debate, that much is undeniable, but there is an important distinction between that status being earned through ingenuity and being achieved through luck. The numerous people who have been in charge of Twitter have never really understood what their platform was, what their users wanted, and how to turn their unlikely success into a stable, profitable business. Obviously, profitability is not a primary concern for anyone setting out to make a global town square, but running servers and content moderation is not free. A true global forum demands stability as you do not want the server going down in the middle of a debate about the future of humanity. But the history of Twitter is as we have seen anything but stable. That is partly understandable. The leadership had no guide to follow, and any platform home to a large share of political debates will be tangled up in thorny questions about content moderation, censorship, free speech, and the public good.
What really sets Twitter apart and what has made it a platform people flock to in spite of its flaws is Twitters user base. Practically every public figure is on Twitter, and a lot of smart, creative, and funny people who are trying to make a name for themselves too. It was Twitters users who made critical features like @ mentions, hashtags31, and even the old blue bird logo. The reason why rivals from Parler to Threads struggle to compete is that Twitter has one advantage impossible to copy: its user base. Quality of life features are great but they will not get people to switch platforms. Social media users are herd animals and Twitter is the biggest flock around. That is ultimately why Musk is not on the path to run Twitter into the ground. Unless he makes some kind of catastrophic change most people will stay for the simple reason that most people will stay.
Buying Twitter then, is all about the users and the platform and the corporation running that platform are almost incidental. No one can tell you whether or not Twitter” is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”, you have to decide for yourself. The best argument in favour is simply that practically everyone who is interested in debating matters vital to the future of humanity are on Twitter.
We started this chapter by asking the question of whether Twitter truly is “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated” as Musk has called32 it, or if it is just another surveillance capitalist machine aiming to squeeze its users for as much valuable data as possible. I personally come down on the side of it being a surveillance capitalist machine wringing users of all the data possible, rife with racism, doxxing, and bad faith argumentation. Which is why I am not on Twitter, but some 540 million people disagree with me, or at least find the positives outweighing the negatives. To them, Twitter may very well be the global town square. And as long as the user base remains, and considers Twitter to be a valuable resource it will remain the de facto forum for discussion on the internet.
Sources:
The Bird
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18 Twitter may soon get formal bid, suitors said to include Salesforce and Google. 03 december 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20171203093743/https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/23/twitter-may-receive-formal-bid-shortly-suitors-said-to-include-salesforce-and-google.html.
19 Kang, Cecilia, och Sheera Frenkel. ”Republicans Accuse Twitter of Bias Against Conservatives”. The New York Times, 05 september 2018. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/technology/lawmakers-facebook-twitter-foreign-influence-hearing.html.
20 Mitchell, Travis. ”Differences in How Democrats and Republicans Behave on Twitter”. Pew Research Center, 15 oktober 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/10/15/differences-in-how-democrats-and-republicans-behave-on-twitter/.
21 Isaac, Mike, och Daisuke Wakabayashi. ”Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone”. The New York Times, 30 oktober 2017. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/technology/facebook-google-russia.html.
22 Mayer, Jane. ”How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump”. The New Yorker, 24 september 2018. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump.
23 Communications, NYU Web. Exposure to Russian Twitter Campaigns in 2016 Presidential Race Highly Concentrated, Largely Limited to Strongly Partisan Republicans. http://www.nyu.edu/content/nyu/en/about/news-publications/news/2023/january/exposure-to-russian-twitter-campaigns-in-2016-presidential-race-. Åtkomstdatum 27 oktober 2024.
24 ”#MeToo: Alyssa Milano Promotes Hashtag That Becomes Anti-Harassment Rallying Cry”. NBC News, 16 oktober 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/sexual-misconduct/metoo-hashtag-becomes-anti-sexual-harassment-assault-rallying-cry-n810986.
25 Ohlheiser, Abby. ”The woman behind ‘Me Too’ knew the power of the phrase when she created it — 10 years ago”. Washington Post, 19 oktober 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/10/19/the-woman-behind-me-too-knew-the-power-of-the-phrase-when-she-created-it-10-years-ago/.
26 Weatherbed, Jess. ”Parler Goes Offline after Being Sold to a New Owner”. The Verge, 14 april 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/14/23683207/parler-shutting-down-relaunch-aquisition-announcement-conservative-social-media.
27 Helmore, Edward. ”Trump’s Truth Social Platform Faces Uncertain Future as Key Test Looms”. The Guardian, 02 september 2023. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/02/trump-truth-social-digital-world-merger.
28 ”Reaching 1 Million Users”. Bluesky, https://bsky.social/about/blog/9-12-2023-one-million. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.
29 ”Mastodon Users Worldwide 2023”. Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1376022/global-registered-mastodon-users/. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.
30 ”Twitter Revenue and Usage Statistics (2024)”. Business of Apps, https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.
31 Edwards, Jim. ”The Inventor Of The Twitter Hashtag Explains Why He Didn’t Patent It”. Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/chris-messina-talks-about-inventing-the-hashtag-on-twitter-2013-11. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.
32 Twitter Inc, Elon Musk to Acquire Twitter. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elon-musk-to-acquire-twitter-301532245.html. Åtkomstdatum 01 oktober 2024.
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